Covering all aspects of Eastern Michigan University athletics

Q&A with Bull Run

I recently had the opportunity to do a Q&A with Tim Riordan, who covers University at Buffalo athletics at Bull Run.

As someone who’s watched it all season, what is wrong with Buffalo’s offense? What can be done to fix it and make the Bulls a contender in 2011?

Well, breaking in a new QB is never easy and UB has tried three different QB’s this year, but on the whole the issues fall on Coach Quinn and the offensive line. Coach Quinn has a system, a system he likes and a system that has worked before but like any system if needs the right people. You can not, and should not, get away with trying to change an offense with no regard to the players you have at hand, EMU learned that last season when Coach English tried to make the Eagles into an off tackle machine.

Then there have been injuries on the line, UB only has 7 serviceable linemen and one of those guys was converted over from the defensive line only to bolster our depth.

I didn’t realize until I wrote my preview for this game that the Bulls have never beaten the Eagles, and in fact, Buffalo is the only FBS school against which EMU has an active winning streak. How does it feel to be 0-3 against one of the worst football teams of the last decade? How does a team do that, yet win a conference championship (2008)?

Simple, you don’t join D1A until 2000 at a school which is not serious about doing what has to be done. UB did not get serious until 2006, when Manuel came on board as the AD. If EMU were in the same division as UB we would have a two game winning streak at this point; whether or not that streak could survive this game I am not so sure about.

Closing in on the end of his first season, what do you think of Jeff Quinn? Does he have what it takes as a head coach, or, per the Peter Principle, has he risen to the level of his incompetence?

I don’t really know at this point. Al Golden went 1-11 his first year at Temple and Turner Gill went 2-10 his first year at Buffalo so the first season is pretty much always a pass. I will say this: he is a heck of a recruiter and he has a good vision for what he wants the program to be. I like his vision but I am unsure if he can get us there based on what I saw this season.

Next season we have several linemen coming back from injury and a few real nice guys coming in. I expect, at the very least, to be competitive in almost all our conference games next season or else I may start packing my bags to get out of the Quinn Camp.

In this week’s MAC Blogger Roundtable, we had a question about rivalries, and in researching it, I could not find any rivals for
Buffalo. What school(s) would you consider your top rival(s)? If you could designate one (additional) school as a rival or make one game a trophy game, what would it be? Name the rivalry/trophy.

Ideally Temple, just because Buffalo and TU are both geographically and institutionally the two “odd balls” in the conference . Temple is a big east-coast university, Buffalo is closer to that then they are a mid-west school. But Temple and Buffalo fans see each other, at most, once a season and the Owl fans are more focused on getting the heck out of the MAC than they are at winning it.

Because of Ohio’s massive luck in the MAC Tournament in 2005 I know some of the more seasoned UB fans look to the ‘Cats. The Rowdies make it easy to hate Akron.

But Rivalies have to go two ways and everyone else has a rival: CMU, WMU, and EMU are in some odd lovers triangle, Kent has Akron, Bowling Green has Toledo, Ohio has Miami, and BSU/NIU are trying to “work it out”. If The MAC adds a school, I really hope they look slightly east of Buffalo (Albany/Stony Brook).

So just for fun, let’s set up an EMU/Buffalo gig, Personally, I don’t think the Chips and Broncos treat you guys right. We can set up a trophy called the “Cut Through Canada Cup”.

I was going to suggest the “Ontario Sandwich Trophy”, but my photo manipulation skills are not really up to the task.

Why does the State University of New York at Buffalo have its football stadium in Amherst?

Why is Ypsi not just known as West Ann Arbor 😉

Because 1) Ypsi is east of Ann Arbor, and 2) Ypsi was settled before Ann Arbor. So, if anything, Ann Arbor should be known as West Ypsilanti. But I digress…

UB’s main campus in in Amherst, NY, because the political machine of Buffalo is completely detached from reality and has been for some decades. I could ramble but to make a long story short…

In 1846 UB was founded as a private medical school located in North Buffalo. By 1950 it grew into a pretty diverse little, and private, school. In the late 50’s the state wanted to set up first rate university system so they founded some schools and started to buy up others, including UB.

With the growth, UB was too big for its campus. Rather than doing the sensable thing, giving UB some of the underused park land along the Niagara River, the city just let events play out. So the school bought a ton of land in a small suburb just north of the city to build its main undergrad campus.

Today UB has three campuses:

1) “North Campus” (Amherst) is home to all undergraduate diciplines and many of the technical graduate programs. The bulk of on-campus housing is located here.
2) “South Campus” (Buffalo) is the original school and still houses the Medical and Dental schools and some of the other programs.
3) “City Campus” (Buffalo) is pretty new, it was created in 2002 around Roswell Cancer Center and is aimed at bioinformatics and life sciences.